Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

The Toy Shop

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

That's what Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post called the newspaper Sports Department. While the rest of the editorial personnel were dealing with Serious Issues, the sports reports were at play. Of course they didn't think of themselves at play. And a heckuva lot more people were interested in Baer-Carnera or Babe Ruth's food consumption than in Neville Chamberlain or Lord Acton's principle. People in the toy shop were not consumed with guilt, Cannon concluded. For most of the newspaper readership they were in fact doing the real work.

Cannon—a pretty good columnist and an even better bon vivant and Toots Shor habitant, dead for decades and almost surely unknown to anyone under 50—never saw or at least never wrote science fiction. One wonders if he would have had a similar label. All right, I wonder if Cannon, famous friend (he told us over and again) of Hemingway would have taken a brief look at a few issues of Astounding or some Groff Conklin anthologies and have pronounced us the toy department of literature. Certainly, and with few exceptions, that is how science fiction writers thought of themselves for a long time. Still do, many of them. "I always knew that I was competing in the minors," the mystery (and occasional science fiction) writer William Campbell Gault said on a panel at a 1983 Bouchercon. To which Elmore Leonard responded, "Well, I knew a couple of big, literary writers like Herbert Gold." "He couldn't carry your typewriter!" someone shouted from the audience. "What's that?" Leonard said. "Didn't hear." Okay, that person was me.

"It was such fun at the beginning," Alice Sheldon (still swaddled in her James Tiptree, Jr. blankets) wrote me in the mid-70's. "Whoosh! press a button and go to Mars. Whee! hit a switch and here are the aliens in my bedroom. Wham! and ignite the laser drive. What a time I had! It didn't stay like that of course." A little later she wrote for the SFWA Bulletin, "James Blish's advice to writers developing a story was to determine who the events hurt. I found out who they hurt all right."

Science fiction, I think, ate Alice Sheldon alive. Alfred Bester, too. There were others. It was all a game, a party in the toy shop for them at the beginning; Bester thought of himself as a great urban sophisticate, television's and Holiday's gift to the grubby world of Astounding. "I've come to the conclusion that almost all science fiction writers have a screw loose," the great sophisticate wrote in his 1976 essay, "My Life In Science Fiction." Alice Sheldon wrote her mentor letters in the late sixties of all the wonderful and strange new friends she was making through her Tiptree identity and correspondence. "It is my secret life and I love it!" We know what happened to her secret life, of course (even before her unmasking stories like "Houston Houston Do You Read?" and "Painwise" and "The Women Men Don't See" and "The Screwfly Solution" were screams of anguish. We know what happened to Alfred Bester in the last decade of his life. "They don't care," a drunken, sobbing Bester said to Charles Platt in the mid-eighties, talking of the fans and of the utter collapse of his novel Golem-100, "They simply do not care." Further details of